Insurance companies and fleet operators have little visibility into driver performance over time. While they can manually monitor for a short period of time, the high overhead required to closely monitor the drivers for an extended period renders extended monitoring impracticable. This inability to perform long-term driver monitoring can become an issue because, as the inventors have discovered, poor driving behaviors tend to emerge after the initial monitoring period (“grace period”), and these poor driving behaviors can be responsible for a large number of accidents or near accidents.
As such, automated driver performance tracking over time can provide great value to these entities. However, reliable driver identification poses a great challenge, since conventional systems can be easily thwarted. With the onset of car sharing and distributed fleets, the vehicle's identifier is no longer a reliable unique driver identifier, since a single vehicle can be used by multiple drivers. In a specific example, given vehicle can be shared by 10-20 different drivers within a fleet. Dispatchers (e.g., digital or manual) can also fail as reliable driver identifiers. Manual dispatchers require a large amount of overhead, and may misidentify drivers. Digital dispatchers can be easily thwarted because the driver identifier is tied to the user account on the user device; a driver can simply use a different driver's user device or account. Similarly, user devices can also fail as reliable unique identifiers, since they require the driver to install the application, keep the user device on, run the application, and use own cellular data to upload information. This multi-step process can raise a barrier to user adoption and use. Auxiliary hardware (e.g., dongle, RFID, beacon, etc.) can also fail as a reliable driver identifier, since they are easily stolen or replicated.
Thus, there is a need in the automotive field to create a new and useful system and method for reliable driver identification. This invention provides such new and useful system and method.